Asking âbout generations
Any notion of generation in the context of the rhetoric of social change is intrinsically tied up with notions of familiarity and intimacy and with ongoing problem of reproduction, of carrying on, staying relevant. Feminists have used the kinship marker âsisterâ to engroup women around their cause in an analogous way male-dominant religious groups have used âbrotherâ and âsister.â But clearly, there are many aspects differentiating the two. But in the history of feminism the intergenerational relation between mother and daughter has not been one of continuity and reproduction. Rather, daughters have largely remained antipathetic to the previous generations of feminism. The female, generational experience in current popular imagination is often articulated in ironic and satirizing terms. When the main character of Girls, Hannah Horvath, exclaims in the pilot episode that âI think I might just be the voice of my generationâ as she presents a draft of her first novel to her parents in order to secure their financial support, her remark is ironically both in and out of sync with her own generation. She is fighting against her parentsâ efforts to make her financially independent all the while claiming that she will be the voice of her generation echoing the history of such calls which sought to emancipate women and free them from any dependencies. Simultaneously, though, her self-agrandizing persona satirizes the universalism of this appeal as a particular, historical way of defining social problems. Implicitly, we understand that in her generation few would claim to speak on behalf of a generation. She rejects the possibility of being the representative of her (or of any) generation by illustrating that any speech is anachronistic, reducing a plurality of social issues to a singular feminist one. What happens in this generational change? How are ideas, experiences transmissioned from one generation to another? How should we even understand the limits and creative force of a generational appeal? Another thing is intergenerational discourse: Communication across generations, it seems, is an intimate phenomenon, though often established by means of few foundational commonalities. Maybe this communication transmissions the wisdom of been-there-done, phronesis.
